State Council Approves Emergency Water-diversion ProgramIn order to improve the present serious situation of water shortage in Tianjin, the State Council on August 14 approved the emergency program of "Transferring Yellow River Water to Tianjin" drawn up by the Haihe River Management Committee.Wang Zhimin, Director of the Committee, said that this 500-km-long emergency water transfer project will start from the floodgate of the Yellow River in Liaocheng City of Shandong Province, via the Qingliang River and the southern Grand Canal section of Hebei Province, to the Jiuxuan sluicegate of Tianjin. It's reported that the project plans to supply water to Tianjin as soon as it's completed in late October. It is the fourth time that Tianjin was hit by drought this year and the city is faced with grave shortage of water supply. Under this circumstance, Tianjin has, on the one hand, strengthened water-saving measures, such as closing car-washing industry and other large water consumers, restricting household water consumption and suspending water supply to agriculture, on the other hand, it had to look for new water sources, intensifying exploitation of underground water. Though the water shortage of Tianjin was somewhat relieved, the surface subsidence was deteriorated. To tackle this problem, Tianjin had drawn water from the Yellow River in 1981 and 1982. It will continue to use some pipelines of the previous two water transfer projects while at the same time make some changes. Wang said: "this emergency project plans to transfer 0.5 billion cubic meters of Yellow River water to Tianjin to solve its problem of water shortage while no other program can meet the need of water." |
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